At the recent OS day 2017 conference held in Russia, Chief Engineer Samsung R&D Institute RUS – Vyacheslav Tyrtov was one of the speakers at the event. Tyrtov took to the stage to talk about the all new Tizen RT OS which was announced at the recent Tizen Developer Conference 2017 (TDC). Tizen RT is Samsung’s answer to the likes of Windows 10 IoT Core and Android Things for a lightweight open source OS specific to IoT and other small embedded systems.
Samsung has developed Tizen RT with special features needed for the current generation of IoT devices that aren’t present on the original Tizen OS. Some of the new features that are implemented in Tizen RT are-
- Network interaction means and remote control
- storage and data management facilities
- A set of components to ensure safety
- Interfaces for interfacing with lower-level hardware
Unlike the regular Tizen OS, which is more suited for larger devices such as smartphones, wearables, TV, camera, home appliances, etc Tizen RT, on the other hand, works with significantly lower requirements for the hardware platform. The bigger Tizen OS works with a wide range of processor architectures such as architecture ARMv7-A, Intel x86, AVR and MIPS. However, Tizen RT at the moment works only with ARMv7-M platforms and ARMv7-R. Samsung even launched an all new Artik module for IoT that works with Tizen RT called the Artik 053. Tizen RT’s minimum OS image size can go as low as 40kB and all the way up to 500kb. The Artik 053 is hence a powerful hardware for IoT needs as it is embedded with the following hardware-
- Microprocessor – 32-bit ARM Cortex R4 @ 320MHz
- Memory – 1280 KB RAM, 8 MB flash
- Wireless Interface – 802.11 b / g / nWiFi @ 2.4 GHz
Developers can make use of the tools and Development Environments such as the ARTIK IDE or even popular open source tools such as gcc, gdb and Eclipse. Samsung also plans to implement Tizen RT with libraries in JavaScript-based – IoT.js in the near future.
You can download Tyrtov’s complete presentation below which sadly is only available in Russian-